Angel Knowledge Series
Keynote SpeakerTim Chang
Managing Director, Mayfield Fund
"Year of the Broken A-Round."
• Moderator: Michael Price, CEO Ventures
Bio.
Tim Chang, partner of Mayfield Fund, is a proven venture investor and experienced global executive. He was named to the 2011 & 2012 Forbes Midas List of Top 100 Tech Investors, as one of CNET’s 12 Most Influential Tech Investors and as a Power Player West and Mobile by Always On. Tim invests in the mobile, gaming, digital media and enterprise applications sectors and co-leads Mayfield Fund’s investment practice in China. He currently serves on the board of directors of BranchOut, a career networking application on Facebook, HealthTap, an interactive health network that virtualizes the doctor-patient experience, and Moat, a brand analytics SaaS platform.
Agenda.
- How to avoid broken A rounds as an angel and entrepreneur.
- Angel vs VC Perspectives.
- Recent selection challenges from me-too accelerators with lower quality “iterative cos”.
- Evaluating key risk of misalignment - founders wanting to sell too early, must ride winners to make up for the others despite desperation of entrepreneurs to take the first good deal, how far does the entrepreneur want to go?
- Historically 75% of seed deals don’t get to Venture A Rounds and why.
- Be very careful if you participate in bridge rounds.
- Really like entrepreneurs keeping them informed on milestone progress.
- Tweener traps: uncapped convertible notes often ruin A rounds (deterrent).
- Trends: larger seed rounds, return to priced rounds, caps coming down.
- Rarely consider convertible note rounds, tried 12 with no good outcomes.
- Like investing with angel groups: more expertise at the table (lead A with angel groups).
- Like name brand mentors with bandwidth and desire to help cos.
- Like strong lead on the angel round.
- Alarm bells: angels not continuing, or lack of preparing to attract preemptive funding
- New incubators often have higher quality at first.
- Established incubators have shifted from quantity of users to high retention.
- Thoughts on Pivots and experience.
|
|